The use of mobile telecommunication devices, such as mobile phones, for voice and data communication has increased rapidly in recent years, and such rapid growth is expected to continue for the foreseeable future. Increasingly, such mobile telecommunication devices are not only being used for voice and data communication, but are also used for entertainment purposes, such as multimedia messaging, mobile gaming, and the like.
Current mobile phones are capable of running a number of different embedded application technologies, such as J2ME, Brew, Symbian, Linux and Windows Mobile, to name but a few. These application technologies provide suitable platforms for the development of a wide range of different applications for mobile telecommunication devices.
The Internet, which is all pervasive, provides a suitable platform for conducting business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) commercial transactions, particularly on the World Wide Web of the Internet. A large number of disparate commercial enterprises currently conduct B2C commercial transactions by means of the Internet. Examples of such commercial enterprises are retailers, such as Amazon™; auctioneers, such as eBay™; online casinos; sports betting entities; and stockbrokers, such as E-trade™.
As a result of the recent rapid growth in mobile telecommunication, a need has arisen to make existing web-based B2C commercial applications available from mobile phones. This is commonly achieved by converting an existing B2C website into a format that is supported by mobile phone browsers, such as WAP, which are inherently of restricted functionality relative to full-function Web browsers. Due to the inherent limitations of mobile phone browsers, it is often not possible to convert certain elements of existing B2C websites for use on WAP browsers, such as, for example, rich Flash components, Java applets and downloadable applications or interfaces. Further, mobile communication poses a security risk as transmission signals are susceptible to eavesdropping and interception, necessitating the introduction of additional security measures.
For this reason, in order to make existing B2C commercial applications available from mobile phones, it becomes necessary to create a more complex B2C application that is compatible both with legacy elements of the commercial application, as well as with small-sized mobile device displays. Such an approach is tedious and unnecessarily expensive. In particular, it becomes necessary to establish an authentication and security system that can be used on mobile phone browsers, yet remains compatible with that of the existing B2C website, which is time-consuming.
A B2C commercial application consists, typically, of an application server that executes a server software program, and at least one user access facility that communicates with the application server by means of a communication network such as the Internet, and that executes a client software program. The client software program receives requests and instructions from a user and transmits these to the application server along the communication network. The server software program generates responses corresponding to the received requests and transmits the responses back to the user access facility, where the client software program displays them to the user in an intelligible manner in the context of the commercial application. The client software program may either be downloaded and installed on the user station, or may consist of code that executes from within an Internet browser.